Technical SEO for WordPress: A Complete Checklist

Before anything clever, check the basics. A surprising number of "we're not ranking" problems are one of these:

• Settings → Reading → "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" is still ticked from the build. This adds a noindex to the whole site.
• A staging or development copy is indexable and competing with the live site.
• robots.txt is blocking a directory the site needs — commonly /wp-content/ , which blocks the CSS and JS Google needs to render the page.
• Pages carry a noindex from an SEO plugin's template settings, often applied to an entire post type by accident.
• The site is behind HTTP authentication that was never removed after launch.

WordPress will happily serve the same content at several addresses: with and without www, over HTTP and HTTPS, with and without a trailing slash, and at both /?p=123 and the pretty permalink. Each variation splits signals and wastes crawl budget.

Pick one form, redirect the rest to it with 301s at the server level, and make sure WordPress Address and Site Address in Settings → General both use it. Then confirm every page emits a self-referencing canonical tag pointing at that same form.

Pagination, category archives and search result pages need attention too. Search result pages should be noindexed — they're infinite and thin. Paginated archives should be indexable with self-referencing canonicals rather than all canonicalising to page one, which is a common plugin misconfiguration that hides your deeper content.

Structure is the part of technical SEO with the most upside and the least attention. A page that nothing links to is a page Google barely values, no matter how good it is.

• Keep important pages within three clicks of the homepage.
• Give every content type a real hub: a category or archive page that lists its items and is linked from the navigation.
• Link between related articles with descriptive anchor text — "WooCommerce checkout optimisation", not "click here".
• Group content into topics, with a comprehensive pillar page and supporting articles that link up to it.
• Prune or merge thin tag archives. Ten tags with one post each are ten near-empty pages competing with your real ones.

• One <h1> per page that matches what the page is about, then h2s and h3s in order. Skipping levels for styling reasons is a missed opportunity, and screen readers care too.
• Unique title tags under about 60 characters, with the distinguishing words first — search results truncate, and the brand name at the end is expendable.
• Unique meta descriptions written as ad copy, not summaries. They don't rank you, but they decide who clicks.
• No duplicate titles across archive pagination. Page two should say so.

Schema markup doesn't rank you, but it can change how your result looks, and it tells search engines what an entity is rather than making them guess. On WordPress the useful subset is small:

• Organization or Person for the site itself, with sameAs links to real profiles.
• BreadcrumbList matching the visible breadcrumbs.
• Article or BlogPosting on posts, with author, dates and an image.
• FAQPage where you genuinely have questions and answers on the page.
• Product and Review for ecommerce, and LocalBusiness for a business with a real address and service area.

Core Web Vitals are a real but modest ranking factor, and they're measured on real visits rather than a lab test. The technical SEO angle is mostly about not shooting yourself in the foot: don't lazy-load the hero image, do set width and height on every image so the layout doesn't shift, and don't let a page ship a megabyte of JavaScript for a marketing page.

Rendering matters as much as speed. If key content only appears after JavaScript runs, you're relying on Google's rendering queue to see it. Server-rendered HTML is always the safer bet.

• One XML sitemap index, containing only indexable, canonical URLs — no redirects, no noindex pages, no 404s.
• Reference it from robots.txt and submit it in Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
• Exclude post types and taxonomies that shouldn't be indexed rather than letting the plugin publish everything by default.
• Use robots.txt to stop crawling of genuinely useless paths, but never to hide a page from the index — a blocked page can still be indexed without its content. Use noindex for that.

Every URL you've ever published and then changed needs a 301 to its closest replacement, not to the homepage. A bulk redirect of everything to the homepage tells Google the old pages are gone, and you lose whatever they had earned.

Check for redirect chains, where A points to B points to C. Collapse them so each old URL points straight at the final destination. And keep an eye on the 404 log: a spike usually means something broke in a template or a migration missed a batch.

If the site serves one country, say so consistently: the right language attribute on the html element, a country-appropriate address in the schema, and content that uses local terminology and currency. For a business with a physical presence, the name, address and phone number should be byte-identical everywhere they appear — the site, Google Business Profile, and every directory listing.

• Search Console is the source of truth for indexing, coverage errors and Core Web Vitals. Check the Pages report for what's excluded and why.
• Use the URL Inspection tool's rendered HTML to see what Google actually sees, which is not always what you see.
• Crawl the site yourself periodically to find broken links, orphaned pages, redirect chains and missing titles before Google does.
• Watch impressions and average position rather than only clicks — movement there shows up before traffic does.

Do the indexing checks first, because everything else is wasted if the site can't be crawled. Then canonicals and redirects, because those stop you losing what you have. Then internal linking, which is the highest-leverage thing on the list. Structured data and speed come after.

If you'd like an existing WordPress site audited against this checklist, send me the URL and I'll tell you what I'd fix first.